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Sorry, “Sushishop”, I’m not convinced…

…although I already had some nice morsels from your take away menu every now and then. You don’t know Sushishop? Well, don’t bother. It’s just another sushi chain in France, yet a very active one. Right now they try to catch costumers’ attention with a huge advertising campaign in many newspapers claiming that they, at Sushishop‘s, would only use a politically correct type of tuna. Here’s how it looks (they even spam their costumers with that):

“This is not red tuna”, reads the banner white on grey, and a footnote below the mouth-watering sashimi pic informs you that Sushishop is only using tuna from the Indian and Pacific oceans which was, unlike its brothers from the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea, not at all threatened by extinction but still present “in large quantities”. Everything’s fine then? And we’re ready to order yet another nice tuna platter? Not quite. It’s more complicated.

The International Seafood Sustainabilty Foundation (ISSF) agrees with Sushishop that the stocks of Albacore tuna in the Indian and the Pacific Oceans are in quite good shape, “at least in the short run” (see the ISSF charts). Does that mean though that we could happily consume it until extinct? I don’t know what to believe. There’s Greenpeace reports from 2004, already claiming that the Pacific tuna is going downhill (“Where is the fish?). And there’s a strong feeling that I don’t trust people who sell fish talking about the ethics of selling fish.